Total Cost of Ownership (“TCO”) is an estimate whose purpose is to help consumers and enterprise managers determine direct and indirect charges of a product or system. A TCO analysis identifies total charges of an asset used by an application and allocates charges to customers who use the application. An example of TCO analysis is identification of total costs of technology used by Investment Management in order to charge back the identified cost for that technology to customers implementing the technology. TCO analysis is used to support acquisition and planning decisions for a wide range of assets that bring significant maintenance or operating costs across a long usable life.
Although few processes and systems are available for providing financial reporting costs in information technology terms, the existing art is deficient because current cost allocation systems fail to facilitate proper communication between, for instance, a finance department and a technology team, thus failing to provide an efficient bridge between technology and finance organizations. This process is complicated by financial staff communicating in non-technical financial terms and technical staff communicating in non-financial technical terms. With the current state of the cost allocation systems, it is time-consuming and burdensome to collect and process the charge and asset data for determining the total cost of ownership. Furthermore, such computations are typically only performed on a quarterly basis even though data may be available to perform this process more frequently, such as, once per month. Moreover, current systems take more than three full business days to compile the charge and asset data and the process is laborious and manually intensive. The current systems are also subject to human error and prone to inaccuracies because of manual data entry steps. Current systems are also unable to process disparate data, that is, data in different formats and from varied sources such as that from database tables, XML files, TXT files, etc. Therefore, since a subset of data elements is used, full asset and application details are not available under the current systems.
Accordingly, a solution is needed for determining the total cost of ownership that utilizes data from systems of record for information technology assets and financial charges, extracts and processes this data to deliver output reports and visualizations on the data processing and analysis. The solution should automate the delivery and interpretation of the asset and charge data and determine the appropriate weighted charge for the appropriate application(s) associated with the asset. The weighted charge may represent the shared ownership for the applications associated with the asset.